Zhou Xiaogeng’s Essentials of Chinese Lexicology is a great vocabulary book for learning Mandarin. It focuses primarily on the rules and forms of word formation. This isn’t just a vocabulary book, and it isn’t a linguistic analysis of word formation, but it’s somewhere in between with a focus on practical learning. It’s a great tool for students of Mandarin at all levels.
I bought this book on a whim since it was cheap and seemed interesting. Zhou Xiaogeng also has a pretty good catalog of works which made me a little more willing to make the leap. I hadn’t read any of his works previously, but what I read showed a lot of promise. This book is the successor or next edition for Magic Vocabulary Builder for Mandarin Chinese (which has pretty good reviews).
This book occupies a different space than something like Harrap’s Chinese Pocket Vocabulary or similar. It includes a little bit of everything, but skips single character words unless they’re used to build bigger words (for the most part). This book tends to focus on the generation of words, but it also touches on all of the other elements of lexicology at some point, though not necessarily in each section.
For the money, it seemed worth taking a gamble to see what I got. Worst case, I had an article about what to look for to avoid buying the wrong work. I ended up coming out ahead of the odds for a random, unknown Amazon buy though. Let’s look at the layout of the book.
Structure and Content
The book is laid out in a series of short chapters. Each chapter covers a different “rule” for the creation of words. There are 46 “chapters”, each of which covers a different way of creating common words. The topics span from principles of creation to onomonopeias. The majority of the work is focused on word creation, but usage and other elements of lexicology are included as well. There is also a bit about certain grammatical elements and ending particles.
Each “chapter” or “rule” covers a couple pages interspersed with diagrams and images. You get somewhere between 1 to 3 pages on average per section. The number of terms will vary depending on the explanations and how many examples are introduced. You won’t hit every word (or anywhere close) for each rule, but the explanations have helped me depose many words into their components and understand how the word came to be. This makes vocabulary learning a lot more efficient.
I don’t know if this is by design or not, but each chapter can be introduced in a few minutes. It feels like a conscious decision which helps make this book’s content much more accessible for many students. You don’t have to choose this work or something else; you can work it in. I’ll get into this more in the next section though.
Advantages
Like I mentioned, each section is extremely short and easily accessible with limited time. I’ve read sections in the car going a couple miles down the road (as a passenger). It focuses on what the individual components of words mean rather than just introducing a vocabulary term.
There really aren’t any terms which caught me by surprise in this book, but there were plenty of terms I didn’t really know exactly how and (more importantly) why they were put together. This book enriched my understanding despite not really teaching me any new words. The techniques and understanding of how words work are more important than the words you learn in this book at a higher level.
Essentials of Chinese Lexicology is also littered with diagrams and images. While some images may feel like filler, I feel they help a lot of newer learners to get acquainted with cultural elements. The images are mundane, but they paint a picture of how China actually is. Most textbooks and resources try to idealize the culture, but this book shows snapshots of real life.
The inclusion of certain grammatical principles and how they work also fleshes it out for lower level learners. Words stretch into more than just nouns and verbs with Mandarin; you also have grammatical structures and similar to take into account. It also cuts out some of the linguistic witchcraft and introduces the reasoning certain terms work and certain others don’t as basically: “Because, that’s how people talk.” A lot of works try to reconcile these with complicated rules and theories to the point of confusion.
Limitations
Essentials of Chinese Lexicology really doesn’t cover usage or anything similar. Certain grammatical principles are touched on, but they’re rarely expounded on. This is a “feature and not a bug” of the work however.
I mentioned a lot of diagrams and images as an advantage, but for every few which add value, there are a few which exist to pad page counts. There are also little character practice sections (or pages) which further pad the page count. The book is about 140 pages, but I would venture the actual useful content (including cultural images and useful diagrams) only hits about 100 to 120 pages tops.
This book promises a lot on the cover and in the summary, but it really doesn’t deliver as much. The “3,000+” words includes individual components and characters. There are certain fixed phrases and similar structures which are put in to pad the numbers. You still get a lot, but this won’t take you to the HSK 5 or 6.
Conclusion
This is a great work for Mandarin learners of almost all levels. Even if you don’t learn any new words, seeing exactly how the lexicology of Mandarin works without having to delve too far into linguistics can help a lot. Essentials of Chinese Lexicology sounds complex, but it skips over a lot of the harder linguistic explanations in favor of making things easy. You get an easily digestible simplification of linguistic rules which help makes vocabulary much easier to palate.
You’ll learn a lot of words easily at lower levels, and you’ll learn the rules to glue characters together as well. At higher levels, you see how characters are combined to make words you already know. I still feel I learned something from this book even though I didn’t really learn any new words.
This book is easily accessible and cut into bite-size pieces which are easily digestible in combination with other works. It isn’t really a free-standing work early on, but it won’t conflict with other works at any level. Essentials of Chinese Lexicology is a great addition to any Chinese learning course or methodology.
Get your copy here:
Essentials of Chinese Lexicology